In 1965, a Ferrari racer turned his back on Enzo and asked an independent to build him a car. From there, it got interesting.

Feature Article from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

When you see it, it's so impossibly low and slinky you can't help but grin; when it runs, the sound makes you laugh with joy. Its history is shrouded in more controversy than the Kennedy assassination, its looks are otherworldly. Little children run out of their houses to watch it pass, and grown men fall to the ground in supplication to their metal god. It's a rolling four-alarm fire, a hazard to pedestrians, an insult to decent persons everywhere, a testament to stubbornness, perseverance and singular vision. The Bizzarrini P538 is distilled essence of the sports car, one of the most remarkable creations that ever came from man's hand.
Giotto Bizzarrini had started his career as a test driver at Alfa Romeo, and moved into engineering work on the Giulietta chassis. He soon found his way to Ferrari, also as a test driver, but again moved into development, working on the Testa Rossa and eventually leading the team that created the phenomenal 250 GTO. His tenure there was short, and he left with five other engineers in an incident known variously as the "palace uprising" and "night of the long knives," after Enzo Ferrari ordered a dramatic overhaul of the engineering department. After that, he opened his own consulting firm in Livorno, during which time he engineered the Iso Rivolta and Iso Grifo, and became friends with their designer, young Giorgetto Giugiaro. His next big commission was about 10 miles from Ferrari, in a little town called Sant'Agata Bolognese, for a startup called Lamborghini. While working for them, his crowning achievement was in designing the 3.5-liter V-12 that launched the company's first car. That engine itself was an evolution of a 1.5-liter unit he'd worked on at Ferrari for their Grand Prix program.
Starting in about 1963, he also began building cars with his name on them, "production" A3/C and 5300 GT road cars. In a complicated deal with Rivolta (as if anything in Bizzarrini's life was ever simple), he acquired a stock of Corvette 327-cu.in. V-8s, and built perhaps 100 cars over the next three years. But this was Italy in the Sixties, and you couldn't call yourself a carmaker without racing.
The P538 was a purpose-built race car, and like the very successful Iso, a Chevrolet-powered car--the cylinder count and 5.3-liter (5.358, actually) displacement lent their name, with "P" for "posteriore," rear-engined. It debuted at Le Mans in 1966, with Swiss drivers Edgar Berney and Andre Wicky, but records indicate that the team retired after three hours with a cooling problem. A second team in a production-based A3/C, driven by Sam Posey and Massimo Natili, was disqualified after a pit lane violation, possibly while returning with serious frame damage.
Around that time, American Mike Gammino was racing an Iso Grifo, having previously run a Ferrari 250 GTO at a high level of competition, including taking a class win at Nassau in the Bahamas. He forged a connection to Bizzarrini from that, but when he got the idea to have a new car built in 1965, his first thought was Ferrari. "We wanted to have a car that would be competitive in the Can-Am series," he said in a taped interview. "I went to Ferrari and asked them if they would build a Can-Am car, that would be competitive with the Chaparrals and the McLarens, and they really weren't that interested." So he turned to the man who had designed both of his cars.
Gammino gave Bizzarrini the chance to live his dream: When he asked for a V-12 instead of Corvette power, for the first time a Bizzarrini-designed engine would appear in a Bizzarrini automobile. "I went to him, and I asked him if he would be interested in building a Can-Am car, which would be able to compete with the McLarens," said Gammino. "So I went over to Livorno, and he engineered the car, and then we went to Ferruccio Lamborghini, with engineer [Giampaolo] Dallara, who also engineered Ferrari but was working at Lamborghini, and we got the four-liter racing engine from Dallara, and we put it in the Bizzarrini, the P538, and it had a top speed of about [140 mph]. It was very competitive."
While the A3/C and 5300 GT borrowed liberally from the Iso, the P538, in either V-8 or V-12 configuration, was unusual to the point of being alien. Giugiaro drew a fiberglass body that one contemporary review described as "a hunkered-down lizard," almost exactly twice as wide as it is tall. FIA regulations dictated some elements of the design, such as a passenger seat and room for a suitcase (as the class was for production-based cars). But no one said anything about putting the driver in the center, the passenger on his left and equipment on his right.
The trunk and flat front profile required a minuscule radiator, not ideal for endurance racing, and the rear-mounted engine required some fancy plumbing, so Bizzarrini routed the coolant though the round-section frame rails, as a sort of supplemental radiator, and, we suspect, supplemental foot heater. The frame itself is a spaceframe, a little beefier than Touring's Superleggera, but the fiberglass body is bonded directly to it as in a Lotus, helping stiffen the wide-open car. Either engine works with a de Dion rearend and Girling disc brakes, inboard in the rear.
The 3.5L Lamborghini engine in our feature car--the 18th V-12 they built, #0127--is fed through six Weber twin-throat carburetors. Estimates of the power output vary, and current owner Van Horneff plans to test it on a dyno, but when Lamborghini first put the engine on a dyno in 1963, it put out 370hp, although Dallara later "civilized" it to a mere 336 (SAE) in their 350 GT. The transmission is a transaxle in unit with the engine, and suffers in feel somewhat from the distance to the shifter.
Gammino raced the first 4.0-liter V-12 car once, after which he retired from racing. Bizzarrini must have liked the idea, however, because he commenced construction of this car with a 3.5-liter engine: Le Mans 1967 was the target. Bizzarrini's operation was on a shoestring at best, however, and after finishing 1966 with neither a result at Le Mans nor anywhere else, they failed to get the new car built in time for Le Mans 1967.
As the spring of 1968 approached, it looked as though they'd be ready for the race, but the Automobile Club de l'Ouest revised the engine formula for the new season, dropping the displacement limit for their Sports Prototype class to 3.0 liters, and ending the competition hopes of the V-12 P538s.
Nineteen-sixty-eight did not turn out to be a good year for Bizzarrini at all. "Bizzarrini was a character, he was never a very good businessman," Gammino told us, and his finances disintegrated to the point where he was forced to declare bankruptcy. It's unclear how much of the car was built when he ran out of money, but in the eyes of an Italian bankruptcy court, it should have been sold to help settle his debts. Bizzarrini had other ideas.
When the assets of Scuderia Bizzarrini were sold off in 1970, including at least one V-8 P538, the 3.5-liter car was not only not among them, it had disappeared altogether: Before the court locked the doors, Bizzarrini took #002 apart and, along with some other chassis and drivetrain bits, squirreled it away out of sight.
After things calmed down, pieces of cars started to emerge in Livorno. Around 1975, Torino jeweler Luciano Bertolero commissioned Autocostruzione SD, operated by Bizzarrini's foreman, Salvatore Diomante, to build one--possibly more--P538. Diomante had several things going for him. First, he had the cooperation of Giotto Bizzarrini and his wife Rosanna, who worked with him in reconstructing the 3.5-liter V-12 Le Mans car. Second, in addition to the P538 parts in the possession of either Bizzarrini, he had apparently bought many more parts at the sale of the Scuderia. Confusing matters further, as the 1967 parts supply dried up he constructed as many as five more "SD" P538s, which used an unknown quantity of original parts, but are generally identifiable by an SD badge and square framing, versus Bizzarrini's tubing. Bizzarrini himself may have built another car around 1980, and still more cars could contain authentic parts from the sale of the business. More replicas appeared in the 1980s and 1990s.
Little wonder, then, that the intervening decades have been a morass of claims, counter-claims and even legal actions. After all, if one could be authenticated, it would easily be a seven-figure car. Fortunately, it turns out that #002 is one of the few with an unimpeachable history: In 1980, jeweler Bertolero obtained a legal document from Bizzarrini stating the provenance of the car; he swore to it again in 1990 at the behest of the then-owner.
Van Horneff acquired it at an equipment auction in the mid-Nineties, where it was listed as a Lamborghini, and refurbished it to a near-concours standard. In his stewardship it's appeared at Meadowbrook and Amelia Island, but "it's a race car," he said, and he's more than willing to drive it.
Four pipes from two pairs of three-into-one exhaust collectors emerge from underneath the car, and the tips are not far at all from the combustion chamber, a fact that was gloriously obvious when Van fired it up. There are few opportunities in life to hear an Italian V-12 through straight pipes, and if one ever comes up for you, take it. The 3.5-liter version would probably be a little down in speed from Gammino's 143-plus mph car, primarily due to drag from the open body, but Road & Track took a 3.5-liter Lamborghini 350 GT coupe up to an indicated 174 mph in 1965.
At low speeds, the car suffers from the ills you'd expect of something built to run flat out for a day at a time: a lumpy idle, a balky shifter and a burning desire to go sideways on hard 30-year-old tires. But there's enough displacement in the block that it will pull well from low speeds, and the steering is terrific, as it should be with about eight pounds over the front tires.
A little blip of the throttle, when it's not breaking the rearend loose, sends the 10,000-rpm Jaeger tachometer swinging wildly. Power peaks at 6,500 rpm, but it's an engine known for its ability to scream to unreal heights. And scream it does. Livable at legal speeds, wind it out and it's pure race car. Gammino's car had a reputation for being tail happy, and with essentially no development time, we're prepared to believe it. On the other hand, Bizzarrini was one of the very best race car builders of any era, and suspension engineering was his forte, so it may not be as bad as all that. At this point, no one's likely to find out.
Even today, a number of companies produce some version of a Bizzarrini, including Bizzarrini himself, alive and well at age 82. Had things worked out differently, he might have ended up as another Lamborghini. As it is, lightning struck in Livorno in the Sixties, but it went to earth. Thank God we can still hear the thunder.
The surviving P538s
Even Bizzarrini's A3/C and 5300 GT road cars are often obscure in origin; today, neither Bizzarrini nor Gammino are entirely clear on what happened more than 40 years ago. However, both agree that there has been no correct accounting of the P538s. There are definitely two surviving V-8 and two V-12 cars; there may be as many as four more V-8 cars.
Chevrolet V-8 powered cars
Bizzarrini used the first P538 built for development work in the beginning of 1966, and it probably crashed that winter. The car that appeared at Le Mans four months later may have been this car, it may have been a second car or, more likely, it reused any and all salvageable parts of the original car, whatever those were.
In 1967, Bizzarrini rebodied at least one V-8 as a coupe and sold it to the Duca d'Aosta. Some sources suggest this was a third V-8 car, possibly constructed as a second 1967 Le Mans entry. Another, possibly the 1966 Le Mans car, was also rebodied; it ended up in the hands of Giugiaro at ItalDesign; he rebodied it a third time (at least) as his Manta show car. Both the Duca d'Aosta and ItalDesign cars have remained in those configurations, and are the only V-8s that can be reliably confirmed as Bizzarrinis built in the 1960s.
Lamborghini V-12 powered cars
Mike Gammino's 4.0-liter car, often called 001 but actually un-numbered, was completed in 1965, after which he imported it into the U.S. He ran it once at Bridgehampton, where "we had some problems with it." He gave it to his mechanic, Liberto Girardi, and at his death, it passed through a series of owners until it landed at the San Diego Automotive Museum.
Van Horneff's feature car is stamped P538 002 on a front stabilizer. It was built for the 1967 Le Mans 24h but never completed. Disassembled by Bizzarrini by 1970, it was finished it as a commission in 1974 or 1975.
Club SceneIso Bizzarrini Owners Club
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916-215-0977www.isobizclub.com
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Iso & Bizzarrini Owners Club
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Dues: $35; Membership: 200
Pros
Makes a strong man cry
Makes a woman swoon
Causes the sun to rise in the morning
Cons
Not as reliable as the V-8 versions
No race pedigree
Swirling cloud of lies, myths and innuendo
Owner's Story
When I bring the car to a show, everybody is drawn to it no matter what they know about the brand or the actual model.... This Bizzarrini is the living, breathing and driving example of the unique artistic vision of a man who created some of the finest treasures in modern auto history. The P538 is undoubtedly the Mona Lisa of the Italian automotive industry, whose creator was a mechanical engineer with an automotive pedigree, brilliance and vision like that of Picasso, Rembrandt, Michelangelo and other artists.
-Van Horneff
ENGINE
Type All-alloy DOHC V-12
Displacement 3,464cc (211.3-cu.in.)
Bore x stroke 77 x 62mm
Compression ratio 9.5:1
Horsepower @ rpm 336 @ 6,500
Torque @ rpm 254-lbs.ft. @ 5,700
Main bearings 7
Fuel system 6 Weber 40 DCOE 21 38mm 2-bbl carburetors, dual Bendix fuel pumps
Ignition system 12-volt, twin coils and Marelli distributors
Lubrication system Wet sump, full pressure, twin auxiliary external tanks
Exhaust system Dual 3-into-2
TRANSMISSION & DIFFERENTIAL
Type Transaxle, single plate dry clutch; limited-slip hypoid differential, Alfa-Romeo Tipo casing with custom Le Mans gearing
Final ratios*: 1st 3.00:1
2nd 1.71:1
3rd 1.24:1
4th 1.00:1
5th 0.86:1
Reverse 2.75:1 *(EST.)
STEERING
Type Worm and roller
Ratio N/A
Turns, lock-to-lock 4.0
BRAKES
Type Girling, servo assist
Front Solid disc, 11 inches
Rear Inboard solid disc, 10.8 inches
CHASSIS & BODY
Construction Bonded fiberglass and alloy panels on steel unit spaceframe
Body style Two door, two-passenger spyder
Layout Mid-rear engine, rear-wheel drive
SUSPENSION
Front Independent; unequal length A-arms, coil springs, tubular shocks, anti-roll bar
Rear Independent; short/long arm, coil springs, tubular shocks, anti-roll bar
Wheels Campagnolo magnesium alloy knock-offs
Front/rear 15 inches
Tires Pirelli Cinturato radials
Front/rear 15 x 6.0/15 x 7.0 inches
WEIGHTS & MEASURES
Wheelbase 99 inches
Overall length 165 inches
Overall width 75 inches
Overall height 37.5 inches (39 at mirrors)
Front track 65 inches
Rear track 68 inches
Shipping weight 2,150 pounds
CAPACITIES
Crankcase 18 quarts
Cooling system N/A quarts
Fuel tank 60 gallons
Transmission N/A pints
Rear axle N/A pints
CALCULATED DATA
Bhp per cc 0.10
Weight per bhp 6.40 pounds
Weight per c.i.d. 10.18 pounds
PERFORMANCE*
0-60 mph 6.8 seconds
¼ mile ET 14.9 seconds @ 93 mph
Top speed 140 mph *(EST)
PRICE
Base Price $16,025
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This article originally appeared in the July, 2008 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.